Sun, 05 Jul 2009

Perl 6 Tidings from June 2009

Specification

Packaging

At the end of May and begin of June we saw several long threads on p6l
about how to distribute Perl 6 modules, and if Mark Overmeer's cpan6 project is (part of) the
solution.

As far as I could tell the discussion didn't become very productive, partly
because the participants tried to discuss too many things at once (for example
distribution problems, format of source repositories and binary
distributions).

My personal conclusion was that cpan6 isn't going anywhere soon, and not
being designed as an evolution of something existing it means that really much
would have to happen until something useful comes out. As a consequence I
uploaded a Perl 6 module (JSON::Tiny) to the existing CPAN and watched the
fallout. My next steps will be to teach proto to install modules from CPAN,
and to pester the modules@perl.org mailing list.

Currently Rakudo suffers from memory handling problems in parrot, where
seemingly randomly the .succ method is called on strings (which is equivalent
to the ++ operator) which for example mangles type names (Hash becomes
Hasi).

Smop and mildew

pmurias makes great progress in implementing multi dispatch for mildew.
Curiously he hits the same speed problems that Rakudo initially faced as the
multi dispatch algorithm became more sophisticated.